An inventory of what your site quietly gathers

What people type in

The obvious one. Name, email, phone, and whatever the message says. On a trade site the message often contains an address and a description of a problem at that address.

This is the most sensitive data most small sites hold, because it is volunteered, specific and tied to a person.

It is also the easiest to reduce. Every field you remove is data you never have to protect, explain or delete.

It is also the data most likely to contain something you did not ask for. People describe their whole situation in a message box, which is why the form carries a note asking them not to include sensitive detail.

Server logs

Every request to a web server leaves a record: the page asked for, the time, the browser, and an address identifying the connection.

This happens whether or not you configured anything. It is how servers work, and it is genuinely useful for spotting attacks and faults.

It is still data about people. Know how long your host keeps it and say so, rather than pretending it does not exist.

Ask your host what the retention period is rather than assuming. Defaults range from days to a year, and it is the one item on this inventory you do not control directly.

Analytics

If you added a tag, it is watching pages viewed, the route through the site, rough location, device, and where the visitor came from.

Most owners look at this twice a year. It is worth asking whether the detail you are gathering matches the use you actually make of it.

Server side counting answers most small business questions without putting anything in the visitor's browser.

Embedded widgets

A map, a video, a font loaded from elsewhere, a chat box, a booking tool, a social feed. Each is a request to another company from your visitor's browser.

That company learns someone visited your page, and often sets a cookie. You did not collect it, and it happened because of your page.

List these by name. They are the part of the inventory that surprises people most.

Each one is also a company you have to name if anybody asks who receives visitor data, which is covered in third party scripts.

What most sites do not collect

It is worth writing this down too. No accounts, no passwords, no card details, no profiles sold to anyone, no advertising network.

Saying so plainly is reassuring, and it stops a template policy claiming otherwise on your behalf.

If you take payments, they usually happen on the payment provider's own page, which keeps card data away from your site entirely.

• Accounts and passwords
• Card details, which normally stay with the payment provider
• Profiles built across other websites
• Data sold or shared with an advertising network
• Location beyond the rough area an address implies
• Anything a visitor did not type or a page did not request

Doing the inventory

Open each template of your site and write down every field, every embedded thing, and every tag. It takes under an hour on a small site.

Then ask of each item: why do I have this, who else sees it, how long do I keep it. Anything with no good answer is a candidate for removal.

Pages here are written from a conversation about your business, and the in-app assistant can tell you what a page loads, so the inventory is not guesswork.

What to do with the list

It becomes your privacy policy. It also becomes your retention plan and your answer when a customer asks what happens to their details.

Redo it whenever you add a tool. That is the moment inventories go stale, and it is the only moment worth remembering.

Nothing here is legal advice. Rules vary by state and by what you hold, and a short honest list is the right starting point for any conversation about them.

Keep it somewhere a successor will find it. The inventory goes stale the day somebody adds a tool without telling the person who maintains the policy.